Ambiance Part I - Tony Duquette

Every great tale needs the perfect setting and so does every great life. In French ambiance can mean, surroundings in its simplest translation. But ambiance is one of those words in French that means many things from the tangible to the intangible such as the fineness of a table napkin to a feeling in the air - to the obvious (the best champagne) and the more subtle (mood lighting).

Ambiance even comes with it's own unique problem - the lack of ambiance. If someone says, ça manque d'ambiance ici that means going elsewhere until the ambiance is just perfect. If Goldilocks had been French she would have risen from the first two beds because they lacked ambiance. 

The easiest way to create ambiance is through decor. Its what makes walking into a beautifully decorated room feel like entering into a sanctuary. Sometimes if you're really lucky you get to walk into another world. I imagine that is how it must have felt to walk into a room decorated by Tony Duquette.

Duquette started in stage and set design and was discovered by tastemaker Lady Elsie de Wolfe Mendl, who is often credited as the inventor of interior design as a profession. As well as being a Lady of high society in New York, London, et Paris – she was also an actress, authoress, and of course an interior decorator.

Elsie in her later years.

Elsie brought the salons and ballrooms of her wealthy clientele out of the dreary Victorian age by dragging it back to a more 18^th century French aesthetic, but her hatred of Victorian décor had its roots in her obviously cruel mother who often told Elsie she was ugly, but “just what ugly was she (Elsie’s mother) did not know”.

One day Elsie returned home from school to see her parents had redecorated the drawing room.

“She ran [in]... and looked at the walls, which had been papered in a William Morris design of gray palm-leaves and splotches of bright red and green on a background of dull tan. Something terrible that cut like a knife came up inside her. She threw herself on the floor, kicking with stiffened legs, as she beat her hands on the carpet.... she cried out, over and over: "It's so ugly! It's so ugly.”

Thusly Elsie developed a lifelong hatred of Victorian furniture and perhaps it might explain why she wrote her autobiography, from which the above story was taken, in the third person.

A room decorated by William Morris.

A room decorated by Lady Elsie de Wolfe Mendl.

Elsie helped Tony get his first gigs decorating for her friends and he had an amazing career – and life. Tony not only did film sets for Vincent Minelli, designed jewelry - he was also the first American artist to be honoured with a one man showing at le Louvre.

What I love about Duquette’s work is he dumpster dived and was fearless. He was the original Do-It-Yourselfer and he was no snob. He happily put 18^th century tapestries next to some crazy wood thing he’d spray painted gold. His greatest accomplishment though was his house, Dawnridge.

There a great blog with more pictures of Duquette's rooms here.

Now even for me a house that was wall to wall in the spirit of Tony Duquette would be a little too much, but juste. My main complaint would be that I wouldn't know how to fit some of my favourite types of design elements into the oppulence of such a room.

I'd love to find a way to mix my grandmother's antiques, my love for jazzing things à la Duquette, and my love for order, the Bauhaus movement, and industrial furniture because when I look at photos of Dawnridge, I can't see a Barcelona chair and matching ottoman feeling at home in such a room.

And I'm not such a fan of such exacting symmetry as you can see in the second photo above. Looking down the room it becomes obvious starting with the two plant stands to the two chairs and even to the two matching purple pillows.

But like I said ambiance can be obvious and most importantly when I look at pictures of Tony's house I cannot imagine for one second that it wouldn't be a perfect setting for a fabulous life. Maybe not mine specifically, but it was the fabulous setting for Tony's own life.

Stay tuned for Part II where I show you the inside of one of my dream houses. It's not going to be what you expect...

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Like the Dickens

THUD.

That is how I came to know of Charles Dickens. I was twelve years old and I had a British English teacher named Miss Mills who had bug eyes, frizzy hair she always wore up, and a long nose that was still too small for the enormous pair of glasses she wore. She was forever pushing them up with her forefinger after she looked down at me. She was quite comical to me even then, but what I remember most about her was what I call the Day of the Thud.

For a few weeks I had been going to my lessons with Miss Mills with a red leather bound two volume edition of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables that I kept together with a simple but practical elastic.

The thud was Miss Mills' response to my declaration that Hugo was the world's greatest writer. To Miss Mills credit she did listen to my reasons about why I felt this way - but I was obviously wrong. The very next lesson she dropped Great Expectations on my desk.

THUD.

Even then at twelve I was meticulous about my reading. I had a very small and sad bookshelf that had been oddly fixed to the wall above my desk in my room. It was only three shelves, but I couldn't reach the top one without standing on a chair and so I naturally kept the books I'd already read on that shelf. The second shelf was for books I was going to read eventually and the bottom shelf was reserved for books I was going to read right away. Dickens' Great Expectations was placed on this bottom shelf, if only because I feared Miss Mills too much to not at least attempt it, which I did a few weeks later.

I am sure that Miss Mills didn't know that I'd read Great Expectations and form ideas about her. She wasn't the type of person who thought she revealed herself in any way, but the more I read about Pip's older sister Mrs Joe Gargery and became engrossed in Dickens' picture of Victorian England, the more I saw things that made me think of Miss Mills.

I attended class with curious eyes. I started to take a closer look at Miss Mills.

All the time I'd been taking lessons with Miss Mills she rarely sat. She always dressed in the same sort of attire - a long wool skirt (regardless of the temperature), a white blouse that buttoned to the middle of her throat, and over this blouse was always the same sort of jacket and always the same brooch on the lapel - a sort of silver pod leaf with two pearl "peas" tucked inside it.

The length of her skirt hid the fact that Miss Mills always wore high heeled shoes. She wasn't very tall but nor was she graceful. After each class she would linger behind in the classroom and change from her high heels into a pair of tennis shoes. I only discovered this because my curiosity about Miss Mills and her life outside of being my English tutor led me to find a convenient spot in the corridor to observe and follow her.

As she walked I saw the flash of white tennis shoes from underneath her skirt. She carried her shoes in a heavily wrinkled brown paper sack. She walked in timid steps and puffed up like a peacock the minute she crossed anybody in the corridor. She never said "hello" or "good-bye" to anybody. She simply said "good afternoon" in passing, as a greeting, and as a farewell.

"Good afternoon." She said to Mr. Wilkes the janitor who was sweeping up the corridor.  It's then that I noticed because of the blazer she wore how her shoulders hunched up in the presence of a man for longer than it took to cross in a hallway. As if she were gathering up her shoulders like loose sheets of paper. She turned her body in the wide corridor as if it had suddenly narrowed and she couldn't pass by Mr. Wilkes without brushing against him unless she did so.

"It's almost nighttime now," Mr. Wilkes told Miss Mills. "So good evening," he said with a smile.

Now maybe it's because I adored Mr. Wilkes and wasn't fond of Miss Mills to begin with, but it upset me when she stopped, puffed up again, turned the thin metal watch on her wrist, pushed her glasses back to the bridge of her nose, and summarily told Mr. Wilkes that it being precisely five thirty-seven meant it was not yet evening.

"So good afternoon," Miss Mills told him again.

Mr. Wilkes' smile faded and Miss Mills unaware of how she'd treated him turned to continue on her way, but not before the rubber sole of her shoe gave a little squeak that sounded like a pathetic little fart. Miss Mills paused a moment with her back to Mr. Wilkes who was kind enough to keep sweeping down the hall as if he hadn't noticed and I slinked outside to the faculty parking lot just in time to see Miss Mills get into a tiny car brown and orange with rust that made an unbelievable amount of noise when she started it. The car stalled after a few moments and finally when it had restarted she drove away in the exhaust smoke that surrounded it like a fog.

I saw through Miss Mills after that. In a way after that I saw through everyone. I paid closer attention to people and wrote down my observations in notebooks. A few months later I won an award for my writing and my father decided if my English was good enough that I could win writing awards I didn't need a tutor anymore.

I saw Miss Mills one last time before she went off to wherever she went off to after she was no longer my tutor. She'd tried to find another student and asked to stay on at the school but there was no place for her. I returned her copy of Great Expectations with a bookmark - it had a little sparrow painted on it and I'd bought it as a gift for my father, but much like me he never had much use for a bookmark. She thanked me for my present, corrected me for using I'll instead of I will, and though I had her address never bothered with her ever again.

But even now when I think of Mrs Joe Gargery, with her complaints and aspirations and nuances I always see Miss Mills. Who looked, with a slight change in attire, quite a bit like the Wicked Witch of the West.

This realisation - that everybody could be a character and was - had a brief but lasting impact on me. People extol the virtues of Dickens for chronicling Victorian England, but I refuse to limit him in this way. Every writer is a historian of their age. There are greats like Dickens, Hugo, Zola, and Steinbeck who did it better than others certainly - but what is it about Dickens that makes his legacy so profound that Prince Charles himself is involved in the festitivities to mark the author's 200th birthday? Why are there festivals in his honour? Why do people walk the streets to find what is called "Dickens' London"?

In Dickens' work, Great Expectations is one of the keys to understanding why his work is still so beloved in the characters of the convict Magwitch and especially Joe Gargery. Dickens believed that people deserved a second chance, but more importantly he believed that there were those, like Joe, who are good to begin with and will always be good.

The other key and the more significant perhaps is in Dickens' best known work A Christmas Carol. Scrooge is visited by his former partner Jacob Marley and the three ghosts, wakes up, and becomes a better man. The narrator assures us that the transformation is complete and permanent. That Scrooge has successfully "changed the shadows of what may be".

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Happy Birthday Bob Marley

I don't blog about music often, but Bob Marley has come to mean more to me in recent months than just what he's "famous" for (weed smokin' & music). As it says in The Red Hot Chili Peppers song "Give It Away", "Bob Marley was a poet and a prophet, Bob Marley taught me how to off it, Bob Marley walk it like he talk it".

It's the walk it like he talk it part of Marley's legacy that I'd like to focus on today. I could tell you about how I think Marley's music sounds better on vinyl even if the remastered album "Legend" has its own sort of majesty. But what could I say about Marley's music that hasn't been said already? Probably nothing.

"Good thing about music is when it hits you, you feel no pain."

 Marley's beliefs led him to refuse treatment for cancer that led to his passing in 1981. This always sort of baffled me as a teenager, but now in my 30's I've talked to a few real "rastamen" since and I understand for someone who lives their life to the principles of the Rastafari movement why it was the only decision.

Note I didn't call it "Rastafarianism". It's not a religion. It's a movement and an ideology.

“Life and Jah are one in the same. Jah is the gift of existence. I am in some way eternal, I will never be duplicated. The singularity of every man and woman is Jah's gift. What we struggle to make of it is our sole gift to Jah. The process of what that struggle becomes, in time, the Truth."

I could list all the things that Bob Marley said, but he's rather quoteable. Most of his quotes are about love. Marley was quite a romantic. He thought love was pretty much the cure for everything. He didn't mind imperfection or a little pain either. 

“The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.” 

My favourite though is one to live by. Really.

"Love the life you live. Live the life you love."

RIP. Poet. Prophet. Legend.

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